How Taxfix democratizes data insights and reduces data team workload with Mixpanel

Taxfix is Europe’s leading mobile tax platform, with over 5 million app downloads in Germany, Italy, and Spain. With a mission to achieve financial well-being for all, the company has already generated more than three billion euros in tax refunds for customers, while making complex tax systems accessible to everyone. In addition to the app, the browser version, and the expert service for tax returns, the company offers an online financial guide and a podcast in German.

Tax season is stressful, not only for taxpayers but for the professionals behind the scenes at Taxfix too. The data team was overloaded with a backlog of tasks for other teams in a relatively short period of time, spending workdays juggling query-writing and fielding questions. Stakeholder teams were sometimes forced to make decisions based on gut feeling due to a lack of data access.

Taxfix explored tooling options, searching for solutions that would allow their product and marketing teams to get answers from their data without relying on the data team. Not only did that align with Mixpanel’s mission of empowering everyone with self-serve access to data, but Mixpanel’s Warehouse Connectors meant Taxfix could capitalize on existing trusted data in Snowflake. Warehouse Connectors made it easy to natively send any data from Snowflake into Mixpanel, allowing Taxfix to glean more comprehensive business insights without a lengthy implementation process.

• Reduced the time spent on SQL writing from 50% to 20% of the workday
• Gained a better understanding of marketing spend and goal attainment 
• Moved to data-focused meetings, resulting in more informed decision-making

Taxfix was founded in 2016 with the understanding that tax season is frightening for a lot of people—from baristas to artists to famous theoretical physicists. Taxfix wanted to make life easier for taxpayers by creating a platform where tax terminology was translated into easy-to-understand language, the filing process was efficient, and the overall hassle was minimized. 

When Jai Mahtani, Product Data Analyst at Taxfix, came on board, he realized that the same clarity of insight and ease of understanding would be beneficial for the Taxfix teams as well. He saw a clear solution. 

“I emphasized how quickly you could go from having a question to actually answering the question if you had Mixpanel,” Mahtani says.

Warehouse Connectors drives connection across teams

Mahtani advocated for a partnership with Mixpanel and soon started a conversation about implementing Warehouse Connectors.  It was the middle of the Italian tax season and things, as Mahtani put it, were “hectic.” Requests increased and time, as a result, was tight. He was joined by the VP of Data Steve Buckingham, whose vision was to have the data warehouse as Taxfix’s source of truth.

“We needed to get a lot of stuff done quite quickly,” recalls Mahtani. “And we unanimously decided to move the Italy data into Mixpanel using the Warehouse Connectors feature.”

The implementation, Mahtani recalls, was easy. “All I needed to do for setup was to create a table in the warehouse,” says Mahtani. “With Warehouse Connectors, Mixpanel quickly and easily ingested the table, unlocking historical insights. Mixpanel also makes it easy to ingest future updates to the table, removing any maintenance burden of the pipeline. All I need to do is maintain the warehouse data, and it’s propagated to Mixpanel.”

 Mahtani recalls seeing improvements almost immediately. Overall, Mahtani says, Mixpanel analysis is strengthened when paired with Warehouse Connectors.

For example, the Taxfix marketing team now leverages Mixpanel to answer their questions and gain a holistic understanding of user journeys, thanks to Warehouse Connectors making it easy to bring in marketing data for analysis. 

“We centralized marketing data in our data warehouse but it was not easily accessible for quick analysis,” recalls Mahtani. “In the past, marketing would need to sift through a bunch of spreadsheets to answer their questions, and it would be quite a nightmare.” 

Warehouse Connectors made it easy to not only bring that data into Mixpanel, but to connect marketing and product data to see the holistic user journey. The marketing team thrived on this end-to-end analysis. With the help of Mixpanel data, they were able to reconsider their strategy, focusing on whether investing in certain channels resulted in registration and conversion. Since they could parse granular data, they optimized their strategy through a series of nuanced tweaks that resulted, Mahtani says, in an improvement in the end-to-end conversion rate.

The journey from query-writing to effecting change

Mahtani has noticed that his own workload has transformed. His role at Taxfix has shifted—he spends less time answering questions and has become more of an internal consultant. He credits much of this to adopting Mixpanel.

“It’s not just me doing analysis,” he says. “It’s the whole team that’s aware of the data and how to use it.”

Another thing that has gotten easier, says Mahtani, is time management.

“Before, about 50% of my time went into writing ad hoc SQL queries for others,” he says. “That will be reduced to 10-20%.”

 This reduction in query-writing time, he says, hints at a change that teams across Taxfix will enjoy: with fewer hours spent on busywork, more time can be spent effecting meaningful change.

The Taxfix week begins with a review meeting. Previously, Mahtani says, meeting discussions would often involve a lot of “gut feeling.” Now, the week starts with a review of the data on Mixpanel. This allows the meetings to be both more flexible and more methodical. There is more data than in the past, Mahtani says, which has driven overall enthusiasm about data analysis. A glance at Mixpanel’s Most Active Users feature, which allows account owners to see Mixpanel adoption at their company, shows that people from across the Taxfix team are leveraging Mixpanel to dig into data—from marketing to management to tax experts.

“You’ll notice that even though I’m the analyst, I’m not the top user, which is a good thing,” Mahtani says, “The product managers are actually the top users.”

Data-driven testing helps Taxfix meet goals

With Mixpanel in the mix, one focus of Taxfix weekly meetings is now A/B testing.

“We’re able to get our A/B test data into Mixpanel through Warehouse Connectors,” says Mahtani.

An early A/B test involved leveraging the power of analytics to assess which of two tax filing experiences were better and preferable for users—and if, after using one of the two options, the users changed their mind. This helped the team decide to implement a new idea, and ultimately resulted in a 15% relative lift in conversion.

The tax season in Italy is over, and the Taxfix team is satisfied. “We hit a lot of our goals,” says Mahtani. “And I think Mixpanel played an important part here in the second half of the season. If we didn’t have it, we would probably not have made the decisions we made as fast as we needed.”

The benefits of embedding analytics into Taxfix’s workflows go beyond measurable results, Mahtani says. Progress is usually defined in terms of success, but, for Mahtani, it’s about wider understanding—and an enhanced decision-making process. It’s about giving more people an opinion and a voice.

When everyone enjoys a clearer understanding, Mahtani says, “more informed decisions can be made by more people.”

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